We’re taking a look at each of the teams we’ve decided will definitely be in a thrilling four-way title battle in 25/26. Here come Chelsea.
You know, we often spend the summer imagining that next season is actually going to be the one that delivers a proper four-way Premier League title fight. Does it happen? No, it never does. I mean, we somehow delude ourselves into thinking it might… but it might happen in 2025/26.
Here’s our four-part series looking at the potential champions. Arsenal have had their credentials lauded. Today it’s the turn of Chelsea.
Let’s start with the obvious point: Chelsea are very much the outsider of the four contenders.
The bookies have them around three times less likely than third favourites Man City to take the title. But the very existence of the sentence ‘third favourites Man City’ tells you this year’s title race has the potential to be something we’ve not seen in a while.
And just as importantly the gap to the rest behind Chelsea is a chasm. You’re looking at around four times Chelsea’s odds for fifth favourites Newcastle, with the next two even more distant teams in the list coming off the back of finishing 15th and 17th last season. We’re cheerfully ignoring their respective charms at this time.
So let’s just agree as a starting point with saying that what ended up as last season’s top four once again contains the four likeliest title challengers this time around.
That feels a solid enough base from which to work, at least for now, but in the case of Chelsea what we need is enough evidence they can sustain a meaningful challenge across an entire season.
And we think it’s there. We’re even starting to convince ourselves they represent the value choice among what now looks like it could be the start of a new Big Four.
For large parts of last season, Chelsea absolutely had the vibe of a title challenger. Far more than City did, really. In some ways the biggest problem, the biggest barrier, to Chelsea being title challengers was Enzo Maresca being entirely unused to such a position and at times, frankly, scared of it.
Around the middle of the season he spoke so long and so loud about Chelsea not in fact being title challengers that it became dangerously self-fulfilling. The fact is they absolutely were title challengers, right up until they weren’t.
As Christmas approached, Chelsea sat on 34 points from 16 games. They’d lost just twice, and were two points behind Liverpool, four clear of Arsenal and seven clear of Man City.
In all competitions they had won nine out of their last 10 games, with the exception a 1-1 draw against Arsenal.
But they then set about proving Maresca right, taking three points from a run of five Premier League games against Everton, Fulham, Ipswich, Palace and Bournemouth. That turned a title tilt into a top-four battle, and even that looked like it might slide away when the wobble threatened to become a full collapse with successive defeats against Brighton in the FA Cup and league.
That felt particularly damaging and revealing about Maresca’s levels, given the way he talked about the loss of a shot at major silverware in the FA Cup being a boost to their chances of finishing as high up the league as possible.
It was small-time loser talk, and at that moment we feared for him, we really did, especially when the next league game brought a further defeat at Aston Villa.
But Maresca and Chelsea turned it round. As well as completing the box-ticking formalities of their Europa Conference win, their league form returned to something like its pre-Christmas self.
It wasn’t perfect, but in the final 12 Premier League games of a season that threatened to go into full freefall for what remains a quite silly football club, Chelsea won eight and drew two, losing only at Arsenal and Newcastle.
It all means that even during a season where Chelsea ended a pretty distant fourth best there were still signs of what they could – should, even – be when it all came together. This is a team that put together runs of 34 points from 16 games and 26 from 12 to start and finish the season. Only in the middle when self-doubt took over did it really go wrong.
And Chelsea – and indeed Maresca himself – no longer appear wracked by such doubt. There has been something that looks alarmingly close to identifiable strategy about their summer business thus far, and the tentative early indications are that this could yet produce something that looks alarmingly close to actually resembling a team rather than an expensively assembled collection of portfolio company assets designed to deliver long-term yield for the balance sheet and also occasionally maybe play some football matches.
It’s entirely up to you how much weight and significance you choose to place upon the Club World Cupand we’re very much on the record for the answer being ‘probably very little’. But do you know who do give it weight and significance? Chelsea. And that might be all that’s needed to see them make the jump from straggler to contender.
Maybe that final really was just a game too far for a PSG side that really had scaled their Everest six weeks earlier in Munich.
But if so it certainly hit suddenly for a team that had sauntered through the knockout stages in America with swaggering, nonchalant ease. Chelsea utterly outclassed them. It was as dominant a dissection of an undeniably elite team as you could ever wish to see.
One-off game, undeniably. Second-tier competition, for now quite probably. But the message it sent and the confidence Chelsea might take from it feels very real and very potent.
The results they were able to deliver last season over a couple of really quite extended periods were already pretty close to what’s required across the season as a whole. If they can elevate those even slightly, as all evidence now suggests they should, then ridding themselves of the doubts that caused them to self-sabotage their own domestic season last time out will be enough to put them right in the equation far beyond the Christmas decs coming down.
